Review: Science in Victorian Manchester by Robert H. Kargon

This monograph chronicles the growth and development of various scientific institutions in Manchester across the nineteenth century, in particular scientific societies, scientific reform movements, and Owens College. Kargon is not a very lively writer, and he is not always very good at making a story emerge from the deluge of very well researched facts the book is filled with: who did what about membership in what society when, who took what post when and what were they paid, who proposed what building at what meeting. I found myself skimming a lot, even for an academic monograph.

That said, Kargon's claim that Victorian Manchester is a good case study for the changes in science that occurred in the nineteenth century is proven true, as the book tracks the emergence of professionalism and disciplinarity, the ways that class interacted with the institutions of science, and how science was employed in the pursuit of both reform and capitalism/industry. I found his concept of the scientific "devotee" a useful one: Kargon distinguishes between those amateur men of science for whom science was simply one of many interests (dilettantes), and those who dedicated themselves to science as a cause and a way of seeing, paving the way for professional scientists. The devotee began to supplant the dilettante in the 1840s, and was himself supplanted in the 1890s, because once science was professionalized, there were good reasons to engage in it that were not devotion (i.e., you could make money), a phenomenon I have seen explored in novels such as George Gissing's Born in Exile (1892) and H. G. Wells's Marriage (1912). I hadn't seen anyone distinguish beyond the types of amateurs this way before, and like the best classifications, it made clear to me something I had not seen before.

(I read the original 1977 edition; the book was reprinted in 2009 with a new introduction by Kargon, but according to Amazon, no other changes.)

About This Blog

This is the blog of Steve Mollmann. I started this blog in November 2011 as a way of chronicling my reading (importing some, but not most, of the posts from an old LiveJournal). I review books here on Mondays through Thursdays, and also provide monthly lists of all the books I've read and purchased. I cross-post most of my reviews to my LibraryThing account. My reading tastes are dominated by comic books, science fiction and fantasy, Star Trek and Doctor Who novels, and literary fiction, especially Victorian and neo-Victorian. Under this name I have also published a number of pieces of fiction, most notably the Star Trek novel A Choice of Catastrophes.

This is also the blog of Steven Mollmann. Under this clever pseudonym, I am an English academic: I completed my Ph.D. in English literature, with a specialization in Victorian literature and science, at the University of Connecticut in 2016. I am currently a Term Assistant Professor of English and Writing at the University of Tampa. I have published a number of journal articles about Victorian science and early science fiction under this name, and am currently at work on a book manuscript about the scientist in British fiction from Mary Shelley to H. G. Wells.

The remit of this blog has broadened somewhat. Though it began primarily as a vehicle for book reviews, I try to post something else once a week, whether it be television commentary (my wife and I are watching Farscape for the first time) or amusing anecdotes from my childhood or commentary on teaching and academia or stories I discover in my research.

I also review audio dramas (primarily Big Finish Doctor Who releases) for Unreality SF. I usually crosslink those posts here.

"Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out." –George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)